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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Breaking Analysis: The New Start-Up Founders Playbook

Unlike the old era of entrepreneurship we live in a new moderner era where the frictionless environment of access to and sharing of information creates new levels of transparency. This dynamic is creating all kinds of new disruptions and efficiencies in the start-up eco-system. Let me share with you my opinion and observations.

On shinning example is Marc Andreessen. He is a true Internet legend and how has quickley become a VC alpha geek & rock star. Marc knows that the typical media cry to fire founders and bring in so-called “adult leadership” is not the model for the future. One reason why Andreessen Horowtiz is so successful – and so disruptive to the old VC model – is because of the commitment, business training and ongoing mentoring they provide start-up founders.

Old media believes what I call venture capital “Playbook, Page 23”, where kicking the founder to the curb as soon as possible and letting the big investors take control is the way to ensure value. This is especially true the moment the going gets tough. But its an outdated model.

What founders need are the tools and the Big Data that allows them to make the right decisions and not allow their “blind ambition” cause them to take the company down a dead end. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz are doing so well because they provide the skills, mentoring and the Big Data that allows founders to better manage and grow the business.

Today’s founders are typically much more experienced. This is why so many, like serial entrepreneur Randy Adams, go on not only to found companies but become investors as well. Gone are the days where investors wanted quick control of the company, wanted to ensure themselves a good exit, and felt they couldn’t trust the founder. Big Data and transparency are helping to bring an end to this outdated thinking. Thanks to data, analytics, training and transparency, founders can make better decisions. Investors no longer need that “plant” inside the company. They know what is going on already.

This represents a new era of entrepreneurship and I believe it is disrupting the industry. We now have founders who have the skills and resources to stay on long after the early stages. Investors are now more patient and aware of what is actually happening inside the company. I think this is a very positive sign for entrepreneurship – and the overall economy.

Obviously, in some cases, founders may need to leave. Too many still want to rely on their gut rather than the information that is available to them or the wisdom of a trusted mentor or colleague. But gone are the days where founders were shown the door so an “adult” could manage the business.

Today’s founders are the adults.

My Video Breaking Analysis Below:

About John Furrier

John Furrier is founder, co-CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of SiliconANGLE, a new media company covering the intersection of computer science and social science. Furrier is also the co-founder and CEO of CrowdChat a social media platform for large-scale group conversations over hashtags. In addition to SiliconANGLE John runs Broadband Developments a private incubator and investment firm for creating new startups. Furrier lives in Palo Alto, California with his wife and four children.